


The Proposal

by Toad1



Series: A Horse With No Name [11]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Drama, Family Drama, Gen, Neutrals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:56:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4688081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toad1/pseuds/Toad1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fellow Killjoy's relative has died, and it's up to Party Poison and Kobra Kid to drive her to a neutral town for the funeral. But her cousin Allie has something else on her mind: a proposition that could both save Kobra Kid from depression and take away the lifestyle that he loves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Proposal

A wooden cross marked the small mound of earth, adorned with ribbons, twigs, and cactus flowers. As the pastor read from her Bible, the crowd of mourners sneaked glances at the Killjoys in their midst. Kobra Kid and Party Poison pretended not to notice. Rasp stood next to her grandmother beside the grave, her greasy dark hair tied back in a ponytail, with her cousin Allie beside her.  
  
“ _Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?_ ” the pastor read. “ _As it is written: ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’_ ”  
  
Kobra’s skin felt unusually clean against the desert air. Before driving into town to pick up Rasp, the brothers had scrubbed themselves clean, tore a comb through their hair, and slipped on plaid button-up shirts. The mourners around them wore plain dresses, collared shirts, jackets, and belts that looked like they had been bought yesterday. The only signs of use were the sand and mud crusted on the soles of their shoes.  
  
“ _When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory,_ ’” the pastor read. “‘ _Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?_ ’”  
  
When the service was over, the mourners gave their sympathy: shaking their hands, giving out hugs, thrusting packages of food in their arms. As the crowd dispersed, the brothers followed the women back down the road. Unlike the crumbling Killjoy settlements, the neutral town was made of brick-and-mortar and strong wooden slats. Sunlight glinted off the shop windows. Kobra even spotted solar panels gleaming on the pointed aluminum roofs.  
  
“What do guys want for breakfast?” Allie said, balancing packages in her arms. “We’ve got rice, beans, biscuits, a couple of eggs...”  
  
“Really?” Poison said. “Oh, that sounds great.”  
  
“Yeah, we’ll take anything,” Kobra said.  
  
“You sure? I don’t want to make something you guys don’t like.”  
  
Kobra laughed. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. After weeks of rice and stale toast, he had almost forgotten that he had preferences for breakfast.  
  
Half an hour later, they sat down at the table. Kobra ran a hand across the tabletop and squeezed the edge. The table was made of strong, polished wood, with matching chairs on real hardwood floors. A working clock ticked above the counter. There was even a tiny television set on top of the cupboard, wrapped with its electrical cord.  
  
“Pretty nice place,” Poison said, admiring his drinking glass.  
  
“Yeah, it’s nicer than Chow Mein’s,” Kobra said. “Tommy Chow Mein,” he said in response to Allie’s questioning look. “He’s our supplier.”  
  
“Oh, that old bastard,” Rasp said.  
  
The grandmother shook her head impatiently, then bowed her head in prayer. Allie did the same. Kobra glanced at Poison, then laced his fingers together and bowed his head.  
  
“Lord, thank you for this day,” the grandmother said quietly. “Thank you for this meal that you have brought before us. Thank you for our visitors, who have brought my granddaughter back to her hometown so that she can pay her last respects to her uncle. As we go through this day, remind us, Lord, that life is a precious gift in these post-war years. Help us live every day so that we might bring you glory. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.”  
  
“Amen,” Allie murmured. The brothers echoed her.  
  
Kobra was reaching for the water jug when Rasp clasped her hands together. “Give me a second,” she said. “I’m going to something for the Witch.”  
  
The grandmother looked up sharply. “You are not saying anything for that Witch,” she said.  
  
“It’s fine. Just give me a second.”  
  
“No! I will not have that blasphemy in my house!”  
  
“It’s not blasphemy, Nanna! I told you a hundred times, Squirt saw her on the road last June!”  
  
“I don’t care! While you’re with the Killjoys, you can do whatever you please, but you will not bring your pagan beliefs into this household!”  
  
“Did I say shit while you were saying your prayer? Huh? Did any of us? Because we didn’t say shit while you were praying, but now you’ve got three Killjoys in your household, and you’re telling us we can’t have our beliefs!”  
  
“It’s fine,” Kobra said quickly. “It’s fine. You don’t have to say it.”  
  
“Yeah,” Poison said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s cool.”  
  
Rasp sighed in frustration. Then she threw up her hands and started piling biscuits on her plate. Kobra felt a pair of eyes on him. He turned to see Allie glancing away, covering a smile with her hand.  
  
After a few moments of silence, the grandmother picked up a plate and started passing it around. The dishes circled around the table: hot biscuits, sliced onions, a loaf of scrapple. Kobra took a carefully measured portion, only taking more when Allie said “Oh, that’s not enough. Take some more.” When the water jug went around, Kobra showed it to Poison, and they both smiled. Their mother had owned a similar jug back in the city.  
  
During a lull in the conversation, the grandmother put down her fork. “Excuse me,” she said, wiping her hands on a napkin. “Mr., ah...Kobra?”  
  
“Call me Mike,” Kobra said, seeing her discomfort.  
  
“Mike, yes. Do you have any plans for today?”  
  
Kobra turned to Poison, who shook his head. “Not today,” Kobra said. “We’re just going to drive Rap back home when she’s done visiting.”  
  
“We were wondering if you could help out at the shop,” Allie said. “Both of you,” she added, as if Poison were an afterthought. “Totally optional, of course, but we’re getting new piglets today. We’re going to weigh them. It’ll be fun.”  
  
Kobra looked up in surprise. “Really?” he said. “You have piglets?”  
  
“I don’t think I’ve seen a pig in...man, it must be months,” Poison said. “When did we last see a pig?”  
  
“Last November,” Kobra said. “In that farm in Zone Four.”  
  
“Well, I tried to sell Chow Mein one of their pigs,” Rasp said. “The first thing he said was ‘You understand this isn’t a farm.’ So I said, I meant a butchered pig, I don’t expect you to haul ass chasing a piglet around. Then he said that fresh meat attracts the Croonies. And I said, what the hell’s wrong with the Croonies?”  
  
“That’s enough,” the grandmother said. “We don’t need to hear about your business dealings.”  
  
“He’s a dick, Nanna. That’s my point. So he said that they smoke in front of the doors. I said, Squirt and I hang around these guys all the time, they’re no big deal. Just tell them to smoke on the sidewalk. He said that when he did, they just laughed at him. So he grabbed a broom and started beating the shit out of them--”  
  
“That’s _enough_ , Felicia,” the grandmother said.  
  
“It’s _Rasp_ ,” she said.  
  
“That is not the name your parents gave you.”  
  
“What? Now you’ve got a problem with our names? You can call Kobra by his name, but you can’t use mine?”  
  
Kobra quickly ducked down to his plate. As the two women argued, he felt a pair of eyes on him again. He was afraid to look up, for fear of being dragged into the conversation. But something told him if he did, he would find Allie looking away again, a strange smile on her lips.  
  
\---  
  
Kobra snatched the squealing piglet and carried it over to the scale, holding it at arm’s length to avoid the kicking hooves. He stepped on the metal scale. The numbers spun, then stopped at _136._ Kobra winced as the squeals hit a shrill octave. The pig squirmed and writhed like a frightened turtle.  
  
“Eleven pounds,” Allie said over the squalling. After she wrote down the number and checked the pig’s ear tag, Kobra placed the piglet on the ground. It streaked back to the food trough, squealing and kicking up dust as it went.  
  
“How much do they usually go for?” Kobra said. He watched the piglets gobble the food Allie had brought: breakfast scraps, a glob of Power Pup, a shriveled tomato. Enough food for a Killjoy meal.  
  
“Oh, about twenty carbons,” she said.  
  
Kobra looked up. “Twenty carbons? Really?”  
  
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “That’s if the farmers don’t come out. If they do, it can hit up to thirty or forty.”  
  
Kobra leaned against the fence and blew out a breath. He added up the math in his head. Six piglets could bring over 120 carbons. More than he’d ever seen in one place.  
  
“That’s a lot, huh?” Allie said.  
  
Kobra laughed. “For us, yes,” he said. “That’s about what we make in a week.”  
  
Allie nodded, clutching the journal to her chest. The wind blew wisps of blonde hair around her face. Her eyes were distant.  
  
“It’s hard for you guys, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, it’s hard for us, too, don’t get me wrong. We’ve actually had to cut back this year. But it seems like you guys are just struggling to survive.”  
  
“I mean, there’s more to it than that,” Kobra said. “We hang out, we go to the bar, make music. My brother’s always working on some art project.” He rubbed a hand across his face. “But yeah. It gets tough.”  
  
“Rasp told me about you,” Allie said.  
  
“Oh yeah?”  
  
“Yeah. Well, she told me about all of you. When she first became a Killjoy, Nanna wouldn’t talk to her for a year. Then she wouldn’t let her visit at all for six months. And then when she could visit, she couldn’t talk about Killjoys at all. But we used to have secret calls where she’d tell me things.” Allie laughed. “All about the Witch, and the Viajero, and all the stuff going on out there. And the Fabulous Four. She said she lived in a town not far from you guys.”  
  
“Yeah, she does,” Kobra said. “We first met her in Chow Mein’s shop. She was trying to sell him a busted-out radio.”  
  
Allie laughed again. “Yeah, she does that,” she said. “Anyway, when Nanna relaxed the rules a little bit, she came up here and showed me a picture of you guys. And your face was the first one I remembered. I thought your name was Good Luck for ages, and Rasp kept telling me, _No, it’s Kobra Kid!_ ” She chuckled. “I didn’t tell Nanna this, but I told Rasp to give me a picture of you. I kept it in the back of my Bible.”  
  
Kobra smiled politely. But as the realization sunk in, anxiety started to well up like a pool of water.  
  
“She told me that you guys run a gas station outside of town,” she said. “And that’s when it really started to hit me. I know this sounds very forward, but, I mean--you’re perfect. You’re smart, you’re hardworking, you can run a business...before he died, I told Uncle Edmund about you, and he said _Make that man your husband--_ ”  
  
Kobra’s stomach dropped. “Whoa,” he said. “Hang on. I’m sorry. Are you saying you want to get married?”  
  
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is very forward. I know Killjoys like to marry for love, but in here, it’s more of a--partnership. You marry someone you can work with. Somebody that’ll help you continue the family business.”  
  
“No,” Kobra said. “I know. I understand that. I just--I don’t know how to say this. I appreciate your offer, but...for me, marriage is about love. You know? It’s not a business partnership.”  
  
She nodded as if she had expected this response. “I know,” she said. “I understand. I just hope you’ll think about it. I really think this situation could help us both.”  
  
Kobra nodded, rubbing his eyes on his palm. His mind was spinning. Allie smiled kindly. “I’m going to see how Rasp’s doing in the back room,” she said. She touched his shoulder before heading back inside, leaving him alone with the squirming piglets.  
  
\---  
  
Cool night air and the sound of insects filled the kitchen, filtering through the screen door. The tiny TV buzzed with the nightly edition of the Battery City News. The picture was blurry and greenish, but it filled Kobra with nostalgia. When he was a child, he used to eat at the family dinner table with the same news program murmuring in the background.  
  
A plate of fried chicken was passed around the table. “Isn’t that something?” Poison said quietly as he handed the plate to Kobra. He nodded knowingly.  
  
“We haven’t had fried chicken in months,” Kobra explained to the grandmother, who was listening. “The guys and us have meat maybe once a day.”  
  
“Well, the farm business is booming,” Allie said. “And we buy some meat from Battery City. That helps, too.”  
  
Kobra nodded. For a few moments, the room was silent except for the clinking of forks. Allie gobbled her food as if she ate like this every day, while Poison and Kobra ate slowly and quietly. Even Rasp seemed to savor her food.  
  
“Do you watch TV every night?” Poison said.  
  
“Every night,” Rasp said before Allie could respond. “She’s always telling me about the shit going on in Bat City.”  
  
“Do you have a TV?” Allie said.  
  
“We do, but we rarely use it,” Poison said. “Maybe once a year at Christmas. And if something serious is going on and the radio waves are blocked.”  
  
“Squirt got a TV once,” Rasp said. “Bought it for five carbs at a yard sale. He brought it home, hooked it up to the generator, turned it on, and nothing happened. And that’s when we realized that we needed a connection to the city network.”  
  
“Oh yeah?” Poison said. “Did you call the techies? They’ll hook you up.”  
  
“Yeah, but they wanted thirty carbs. Then another twenty for some tech they had to install on our roof. So I said, fuck it, we’re sticking to the radio.”  
  
“That’s enough, Felicia,” the grandmother said.  
  
As the evening wore on, Kobra tensely for Allie to bring up the proposal. But she said nothing about it. When dinner was over, they helped wash the plates while Allie packed up the leftovers. With a feeling that they needed to talk, they excused themselves and headed to the back porch. From inside the house, Kobra could hear the beginnings of a soap opera.  
  
The brothers leaned against the railing and stood in silence for a moment. Insects sang shrilly in the grass. Chickens scratched and clucked in the roost behind the house. Lights glowed in the neighbor’s windows: not flickering candlelight, but the steady, unblinking glow of a lightbulb.  
  
“I wonder if this is how they lived before the wars,” Kobra said.  
  
“Probably,” Poison said. “But with a lot more noise, with all their tech gadgets and shit.”  
  
Kobra laughed a little. Then he thought of the proposal, and he sunk back against the railing. His eyes grew dim.  
  
“You know...I don’t think I can do this anymore, man,” he said.  
  
“Do what?” Poison said.  
  
“Suffer through another winter. I can’t take it--the hunger, the cold nights, being depressed all the time--I can’t do it, man.”  
  
“You’re not going to have to do that again, Kid,” Poison said gently. “Jet and I have talked about it. We’ve got to save up more supplies this year. Maybe try to find a neutral town that’ll take us for a couple of months.”  
  
“That’s not enough,” Kobra said. “We try something new every year, but it’s never enough. I think this might be our only way out.”  
  
Poison stared at him. “Wait,” he said. “You’re really thinking about marrying her?”  
  
“Rasp and I talked about it,” he said. “If I get married to her, I’ll own half the store. We’re looking at an income of around five hundred carbons a month. They order from the city, the town’s got solar power and farmland. Winters are easy compared to our shit. They just hunker down and keep a tighter hold on their supplies.”  
  
“No, wait,” Poison said. “Kid. You can’t do this. Do you think the guys are just going to move out here with you? The neutrals hate us, man. They didn’t even want to let us in.”  
  
Kobra waved a hand. “We’ll work something out,” he said.  
  
“No, we won’t. Kid, it’s not that simple. You’re leaving everything behind. You’re leaving the diner, you’re leaving your friends--”  
  
“I do that every winter,” Kobra said. He rubbed his face with his hands. “Christ. You’ve seen how it is, when I get depressed...I can’t go through that shit again. I can’t keep being a burden on you guys every year.”  
  
“You’re not a burden,” Poison said. “Don’t tell yourself that. Come on.”  
  
When Kobra didn’t respond, Poison touched his arm. “Kid,” he said gently. “You can’t marry someone you don’t love.”  
  
“It’s not about love,” Kobra said. “Not for either of us. It’s about survival.”  
  
Poison was silent for a few moments. Voices murmured inside the house. Somewhere in the distance, a toad let out a shrill call.  
  
“Hey,” Poison said. “I know winter’s been hard for you, but--if you marry her, you’re going to be miserable. All year round. It’s going to be like you’re back in the city.” Kobra tensed at the words. “You’ll have to deal with city shit, their rules and regulations, and you’ll lose everything you love about the Zones--you’ll lose your friends, going to shows and bonfires, riding derbies, and I know you, Kid. That’s going to suffocate you.”  
  
“I’ll survive, man,” Kobra said. “Always have.”  
  
“It’s not just about survival,” Poison said. “We didn’t come out here just to survive, kiddo. You know that.”  
  
He loosely draped an arm around Kobra’s shoulders. Kobra returned the gesture. They stood on the porch for a few minutes, gazing off at the back yard, where the chickens scratched in their pen. Then the door creaked open behind them. Rasp stood in the doorway, half-hidden by the screen.  
  
“Hey,” she said. “You ready to go?”  
  
Poison glanced at Kobra. After a moment, he nodded. Then Poison patted his back, and they followed her back inside the house.  
  
Allie and her grandmother waited in the kitchen with two covered bowls. Kobra peered inside the bowl Allie handed him, then stopped. Inside was the leftover chicken and biscuits. Poison’s bowl held an avalanche of dry white beans.  
  
“We had a surplus of beans this month, so my granddaughters thought we could donate a few cups,” the grandmother said, a little stiffly.  
  
“Those’ll be great for breakfast,” Allie said. “I have them with toast all the time.”  
  
Poison stared at them open-mouthed. “Oh, no,” he said. “This is too much. We can’t take this.”  
  
“Oh, it’s fine,” Allie said. “We’ll order another bag next month.”  
  
“Don’t worry about them,” Rasp said, munching on a piece of cold chicken. “They’re loaded.”  
  
Poison chuckled, then pulled Allie into a hug. She grinned and patted his back. He reached out to the grandmother, who allowed a quick hug before releasing him. Then Allie turned to Kobra, who smiled with a mixture of warmth and guilt.  
  
“Hey,” he said. “I really appreciate what you’ve done for us--”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, as if she knew exactly what he meant. “It was worth a try, I suppose.”  
  
Kobra smiled at her, then pulled her into a hug. On impulse, he kissed her on the cheek. Then he stepped back, where Poison and Rasp were waiting in front of the table. Poison smiled faintly and patted him on the shoulder.  
  
“Ready to go?” he said.  
  
Kobra nodded. Allie and her grandmother followed them to the door, watching from the front porch. Porch lights cast across the windshield as the Killjoys drove into the night, heading back to their settlement, and to whatever the Zones had in store for them.


End file.
